Friday, 1 May 2009

Sap rising

Yesterday I happened to be in Glasgow and visited the KelvinHall Museum. One of the galleries contained some of the work by the Macdonald sisters, artists based in Glasgow at the turn of the twentieth century. In particular, there was a painting titled "Oh ye that walk in Willow Wood" that really caught my eye. There's a link here, though the on screen colours can not hope to match the subtelty of the original.

My thoughts turned to how I could use those lovely colours in my own models. The obvious candidates would be elves, epsecially wood elves. Searching through my piles of plastics bits I found some glade guard and dryads, a solid start to an army. I also have a few bits of plastic high elves, which I could mix in with the wood elves. My idea is to build an army that can be used as wood elves, but also could be used as High Elves from the sylvan realms of Avelorn and Chrace. I could build the archers and spears to be inter-changeable across the two armies. I could also use glade riders/ellyrion reavers in a similar fashion, maybe even silver helms too at a push. If I could get together a half dozen units in this way, it would be a solid start to two armies for the price of one. Result!

When it comes to special units the inter-changeability would be more difficult, so I would probably stick to army specific units such as wardancers and White Lions. Having said that, a unit or two of shadow warriors could easily double as waywatchers.

For characters, the idea of restricting them to female mages is appealing. I have a couple of metals that spring to mind immediately. There's also the mouth-watering prospect of modelling a female elf on a unicorn or an eagle, maybe even a stag.

I need to think about the idea a bit more, to see if it crystallises as a more definite plan, or just another of those pipe dreams.